50 ms·

Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II

• hgomersall 4y ago
  I have a similar question: why did the jet engine take so (relatively) long, since it's basically a turbo charger with an integrated combustion chamber. The answer, as with the steam engine is the materials science needed to be done first.
• zabzonk 4y ago
  What I have always wondered about is why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier? Or put it this way: when was the folded paper (or your material here) airplane invented, and by whom? Then, why not make it bigger?
  • morelisp 4y ago
    Kites are prehistorical. You can't really get earlier than that, unless we find some pre-human primates making them. (parent edited) > Then, why not make it bigger? To what end? They were lifting bombs on kites as early as the 7th century, as well as humans as novelties (and punishments - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuan_Huangtou). If you want a lift a human to do something, you also need some better steering and safe landing, and those require more reliable engineering besides just the basic lift possibility.
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      Kind of supports my question - if tethered kites, why not untethered ones (i.e. aircraft)? And man-lifting kites have, of course been a thing for ages.
      • morelisp 4y ago
        Reliable steering requires aerodynamics requires quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering. And it's extremely dangerous, a lot of people did die trying to make steerable kites.
        • zabzonk 4y ago
          > quite a lot of mathematical development, plus considerable precision engineering Not sure the Wright brothers would be with you on this - neither were maths guys and their aircraft were hardly precision-built.
          • morelisp 4y ago
            And what, there's nobody between Archimedes and the Wright Brothers I could have been referring to? Whatever...
          • deleted 4y ago
            [deleted]
          • dredmorbius 4y ago
            The Wrights did extensive experimentation, on both models an full-sized prototypes. They built the first wind tunnel and developed calculations for lift and propeller thrust. They also practiced fairly rapid design iteration, trying out ideas and adapting to actual experience. What they arrived at worked, though it was far from ideal and doesn't much resemble modern aircraft (beyond the notion of wings and the rough principles of control surfaces). Once other designers / engineers entered the field, and with more reliable engines, further iteration advanced rapidly. Military aircraft played a significant role in WWI, only a decade after the Wright's first powered flight.
          • slightknack 4y ago
            > He identified the four forces which act on a heavier-than-air flying vehicle: weight, lift, drag and thrust. [...] He also designed the first glider reliably reported to carry a human aloft. He correctly predicted that sustained flight would not occur until a lightweight engine was developed to provide adequate thrust and lift. The Wright brothers acknowledged his importance to the development of aviation. — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley I think by the time the Wright brothers came around, the general theory for powered flight was in place. The Wright Flyer was precision engineered, compared to most 'kites' that came before it. It's not every day you see an internal combustion engine on a kite.
  • kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    Paper airplanes were around for centuries. Nobody knew how they worked.
    • f0e4c2f7 4y ago
      This is really interesting and I had never considered it before. Would you happen to know any books or articles that tell the history leading up to the wright brothers but focusing on those kind of questions and theories?
      • morelisp 4y ago
        Although the mathematics is quite complex (Newton, Bernoulli, Navier-Stokes) the history happens fairly quickly as the mathematics appears. Bernoulli published in 1738, Cayley designed the fixed-wing aircraft in 1799. From that point it was mostly a matter of finding ways to increase thrust / reduce weight through better engine design to achieve useful flight time / lift.
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      Nobody knew how penecilin worked when it was first discovered (we now know it inhibits the growth of the bacterial cell wall) but that did not stop people using it, to good effect. Similar for many other discoveries/inventions.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        More generally: technology (engineering) delivers results. Understanding why it does so is not required, and often comes quite late. If you want explanation, that's a role of science, though it's often preceded by a very long period of systematic observation. One striking example is geology, which has existed since at least the 17th century, but which didn't formally adopt its central organising and explanatory principle, of plate tectonics, until 1965. Biology (evolution and DNA), physics (celestial mechanics, particle physics, reletivity, and quantum theory), and chemistry (periodic table and electron orbitals) also come to mind. Thermodynamics arose out of work with steam engines, and eventually developed to the point that the theoretical understanding and equations began driving, rather than being driven by, engineering accomplishments. Electrical engineering is another example where modern developments required understanding of, and calculations based on, circuit and field theory, rather than just more lab experimentation. (I'm hazy on details here, though this is my general understanding.) There are practices which existed for many thousands of years before a deep understanding was achieved: fermentation, fire, firing ceramics, glassmaking, smelting metals, and many agricultural practices. Doing and understanding are separate undertakings.
  • Jensson 4y ago
    They lacked the physics theory to make planes stable enough to carry a load, and nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed.
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      > nobody wants to experiment throwing themselves out over a cliff with prototype wings that will likely get them killed. Actually, not a few people did exactly that! If they had used a scaled-up paper plane, they might have lived. Or think of a modern hang-glider, but made from bamboo and silk.
    • magpi3 4y ago
      He wasn't testing wings, but you make me think of this poor, brave man. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Eiffel_Tower_ju...
    • dham 4y ago
      You didn't need to throw yourself off a cliff though. Just think of something like Jockey's Ridge.
      • saalweachter 4y ago
        I mean, an improvement, but that just means that you'll be killed when your wings half work (enough to lift you into the air high enough that the fall will kill you) rather than when your wings don't work at all.
  • narag 4y ago
    Only the tough materials (stone, bones, metal, pottery) remain. I always wonder how many civilizations disappeared without a trace because they built their cities with wood. Maybe a lot of devices were invented and reinvented many times and then forgotten because there wasn't a practical purpose for them at the moment.
    • saalweachter 4y ago
      It's probably the case that foundations get invented pretty darn quick in a civilization that builds primarily with wood. Wood rots too fast in environments where (a) trees grow and (b) wood is in contact with the ground. Midden heaps can also close the gap.
    • masswerk 4y ago
      My favorite example is the Antikythera mechanism. It is quite clear that this had not been a one-of-a-kind, but that there must have been (many) predecessors of this technology to arrive at the kind of workmanship and layout that doesn't show any marks of hesitation or corrections as in the sole example, we know of. And that we know of this example at all, is just by sheer luck. Generally, we only know of landmark size applications of historical technology, which tend to be rare.
      • jacquesm 4y ago
        It probably wasn't as common as the slide rule was in the 50's but I'm pretty sure there were more of these and some predecessors as well. The chance that we have found the only example that ever existed for something so useful seems slim.
  • globalise83 4y ago
    I often wonder the same. As someone with a hobby of making unpowered gliders from balsa wood and laminating sheets, I often wonder why such simple contraptions (I can make very nice gliders with around 20 pieces of wood and one sheet) weren't discovered using easily available woods and paper many centuries ago and extrapolated to bigger machines with fabric and wooden struts. Seems that the raw materials would have been available in Roman times and only very minimal amounts of theory (as opposed to trial and error tinkering) are required. Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare.
    • earthbee 4y ago
      Maybe because trial an error improvement isn't possible if you're actually flying the vehicle? Just a guess.
      • zabzonk 4y ago
        Solution: send your butler up in it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley
    • morelisp 4y ago
      > Truly remarkable that gliding firebombs and the like were never invented for warfare. What? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kite#Military_applications Steering is important though, you need to a) go up, b) go the right place, not back at you, c) come down, again not where you are.
      • pbhjpbhj 4y ago
        I wonder how much people tried to develop ballistae projectiles, perhaps once they had bolts/darts they were good enough and longer range just wasn't necessary?
        • morelisp 4y ago
          In most cases if your goal is just to get some explosives over a tall wall, a trebuchet or siege tower is probably sufficient. On the other hand, if you have a lot of gunpowder, a cannon is also pretty fine on its own without any need to go up-and-over.
  • iso1631 4y ago
    Heavier than air flight dates back at least 2500 years from bamboo helicopter toys in China, with various others through the 17th to 19th century, however the first manned, powered, controlled flight of a heavier-than-air craft wasn't until Whitehead, Wright et. al at the end of the 19th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitive_beginnings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines#Primitiv...
  • masswerk 4y ago
    Mind Eilmer of Malmesbury, first flight between 995 and 1010 CE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilmer_of_Malmesbury
    • masswerk 4y ago
      P.S.: The story of Eilmer also hints at what may have been the real problem, which may have haunted early fliers, not so much flying/gliding, but safe landing. Another thing is topography: Either you have (steep) local elevations as a natural starting point for gliding, but then there is usually not much of an open space to go for a real application. Or there are wide open spaces, but no natural elevations. (Mind Eilmer starting from a tower.) So, even if you know about the principles, there's not much application for human flight, rendering it rather for use as a toy. (There are hints for bird-shaped gliding toys in ancient Egypt. But was there really a human-flight scale application in an all flat landscape like this?)
      • zabzonk 4y ago
        Annecdote time: I live in Lincoln, UK - to the East everything is flat as a pancake until you get to the Wolds, and to the west we have the similarly flat floodplain of the Trent river. In between, we have the very steep Lincolnshire Edge (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Cliff) and the prospective aeronaut could have jumped off Lincoln Cathedral (https://lincolncathedral.com)- https://lincolncathedral.com)- way back when the highest building in the world. So ideal for developing a useful glider. And of course Lincolnshire is famous for being "bomber country" in WW2 - weather and geography helping to get the horribly overladen beasts airborn.
  • pirate787 4y ago
    In European culture, there's the myth of Icarus, whose wings failed in flight. I wonder if there's a real-life basis for this tradition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus
  • goto11 4y ago
    Probably because sustained heavier-than-air flight requires an engine. So same reason the car was not invented earlier - a coal-powered steam engine is too heavy.
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Steam has other disadvantages. It's quite good at steady-power output. Throttle response is poor. Both automobiles and aircraft operate with quite variable power requirements. Though at least for long-range air travel, once the take-off / climb portion of flight has been completed, cruise is typically at a fairly constant setting.
    • Koshkin 4y ago
      I does not have to be "sustained" for more than a few minutes to be called a flight. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deltaplane
      • goto11 4y ago
        Sure, but beside the point. There are many historical examples of heavier-than-air flight (kites, gliders etc.), but without means of self-propulsion it is not very practically useful.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. Once rapid design-build-test cycles were practial, the initial Wright design rapidly shifted to a monocoque fuselage with forward wings and empennage, emerging within a decade. In just over 30 years after the Wright's first powered flight, the DC-3, an aircraft still in commercial operation was flying. It has been described as the perfection of aircraft design, and the major elements of its design are still present on contemporary aircraft, though of course jet engines have largely replace reciprocating piston engines. Major factors in successful powered or unpowered flight have been understanding aerodynamics (largely through experimentation and test flights, increasingly through modelling), materials (pre-industrial materials are poorly suited to human-scale aircraft or gliders), controls (both theory and interfaces), powerplants (on powered aircraft). Ultralights, hang gliders, and sailplanes all benefit greatly from specific materials: Nylon for wings, aluminium for structural members, plastics, and steel for wires and cables. Instrumentation, navigation, communications, transponders (safety) and radar (collision detection) also factor in. Virtually all of these are dependent on earlier stages of industrialisation: smelting of iron and aluminium, petroleum chemistry and textiles fabrication for Nylon and plastics, earlier aviation engineering for general flight handling and control theory, electronics for instrumentation, radio, and radar, plus domain knowledge from other fields such as physics (instrumentation, controls, etc.). TL;DR: Prerequisites and path dependencies.
    • criley2 4y ago
      >Powered flight came about virtually the moment a high power-to-weight engine (based on aluminium and petrol fuel) existed. The only thing I would change is that this makes it seem like powered flight was waiting on the engine, when it was waiting on the plane. One thing that struck me at the Museum of Flight in Seattle is how far advanced IC technology was while the Wright brothers were gliding in wooden contraptions. They had turbocharged v12 diesel engines and Benz was already making aluminum engines for cars before the Wright brothers made their first attempt. I found it fascinating how as soon as flight was demonstrated, it only took a few years to go from a wooden prototype to a sophisticated machine with a very complex engine. Bonus pic of some of those early engines https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png https://i.imgur.com/mENnuHH.png
  • stevenjgarner 4y ago
    What amazes me about heavier than air flight is that it was invented all over the planet at virtually the same time by all kinds of unrelated people who had no connection or communication with or little knowledge of one another. Sure here in the US we ethnocentrically recite the Kitty Hawk event of the Wright Brothers as if it appeared in a vacuum out of nowhere. But in reality, heavier than air flight was invented simultaneously (by the standards of the time) at multiple places all over the world from New Zealand (March 1903) [1] to the USA (December 1903) [2]. It's as if human consciousness just exploded with a new-found ability to fly all over the earth all at once. Closer examination shows that like most human inventions, these breakthrough moments are the final incremental accumulation of ideas that were a long-time coming. In the case of flight, there were centuries of lighter than air flying methods based on buoyancy and displacement [3]. Then gradually an understanding of fixed wing aerodynamics evolved (e.g. the impressive work of people like George Cayley [4] and Otto Lilienthal [5]). It was the parallel development of combustion engines that made the Kitty Hawk and Waitohi moments eventually possible (which I think might really the answer to your question "why heavier-than-air flight was not invented earlier?"). While the invention of the steam engine gave rise to the entire industrial revolution, piston steam engines of the time were too heavy to power flight. The internal combustion engine was finally applied to the automobile by Karl Benz in 1885 [6] and within the relatively short span of 18 years had evolved to the point where powering an aerodynamic surface was feasible. Just 66 years later man walked on the moon. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_flying_machines [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Cayley [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Lilienthal [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Benz
    • zabzonk 4y ago
      I think that what you say is probably true, but things like thermal-riding or slope-soaring gliders would have been very useful (for the military, if nothing else) before the invention of the IC engine.
  • random314 4y ago
    Michael faraday invented the motor in the 1820s. Successive refinements to the motor and the gas engine and electricity distribution projects led to electrification, the motor car and the powered airplane as an immediate consequence.
  • GistNoesis 4y ago
    The boomerang is quite old.
  • antonhowes 4y ago
    Fantastic question, which is some way down on my to-do list after the steam engine. The discussion this prompted is a real goldmine, so thank you.
• a_bonobo 4y ago
  Just 4 days ago Nature Genetics had a really cool perspective on why nobody else did the experiments on inheritance Gregor Mendel did: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01109-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-022-01109-9
  • Beltalowda 4y ago
    This seems interesting, but unfortunately I can't find the full text anywhere and I'm not about to pay $32 for an article.
    • AussieWog93 4y ago
      If you check the article for libgen on Wikipedia you'll get the latest domain name for it. Then, just copy and paste the title of the article you want to read into the libgen search bar and you're good to go.
      • Beltalowda 4y ago
        Yeah, I checked that and Sci-Hub, but neither has this particular article unless I did something spectacularly wrong, and nothing came up with an internet search either.
• napier 4y ago
  • emptyfile 4y ago
    If I was on a more sophisticated forum I would assume this is satire. Alas, just classic HN tech bro nonsense.
    • masswerk 4y ago
      Just good old 19th century play write logic. In essence, it's about not seeing the role of an economic window of opportunity for opening up a then rapidly advancing segment of the "tech tree". E.g., the idea of the locomotive only became viable with the Napoleonic wars and the (at times) exponential increase in prices of horses and/or fodder (esp. between 1808 and 1824 in the UK, these spikes are also, when we see any major projects started). With maintenance costs of horse driven machinery rising, even marginal technology like early locomotives became viable, eventually leading to a mature technology, which is economical sound even in normal times. (We me see similar with rising natural gas prices in Europe, nowadays.) So, why hadn't this been pursued earlier? Well, it must have been because of the stubbornness of the ancestors. Usually, this is accomplished by ignoring that there had been always a difference between a commonly acknowledged working model and a higher spiritual truth, which seldom clashed, only when it came to claims that endangered the hierarchy. (E.g., the idea of everyone actually believing in a flat earth originates essentially in a 19th century play about Columbus. However, the T-shaped world map was never a working model, it conveyed a spiritual truth only. Columbus' problem was really him proposing that the world was smaller than generally assumed, thus there would be no room for another continent – for which there had been some evidence – and a direct way to India. Which is, as we know, not how it works.)
  • andrepd 4y ago
    Absolutely. Christian monks in particular were a force of strong obscurantism, from the 300s when they gained power in the Roman Empire and for the millennium that followed. The picture we have in our minds of the scholar monk copying the Greek classics was only really true starting with the 1200s, not earlier.
• terhechte 4y ago
  The Greek philosoper Hero of Alexandria actually invented something close to a steam engine in the 1st century BE [1]. Whenever I think about "obvious" inventions which happened quite late in our civilization, I remember "The road not taken", a fantastic short story that plays with this idea. [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_(short_stor...
  • eesmith 4y ago
    That's a different sort of steam engine. From the article: > But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a machine that does the exact opposite, exploiting the apparent sucking power that occurs when hot steam is rapidly condensed with a spray of cold water. It’s the relative weight of the atmosphere, compared to the sudden vacuum from condensing steam, that does all the work. This article connects that sort of engine to (among others) Hero of Alexandria’s temple doors, rather than the aeolipile, though suggests that it might have been known to "at least a few aeolipile-users" as a way to fill the aeolipile with water.
    • antonhowes 4y ago
      Thank you! It’s extremely gratifying to know that HN readers like yourself do actually go and read the posts. :D
  • tialaramex 4y ago
    Chris Robertson's "O One" has a British man present the Chinese Emperor (well, Emperor of the World, China having conquered the rest of the globe) with his primitive Analytical Engine, a machine which can perform arithmetic. The many human Computers employed in the Emperor's House of Computation are keen that this idea shouldn't go anywhere...
  • qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
    So why did it not win? The answer. Slaves. Slaves in the mines, slaves in the home, slave driving the rowboats and all services. Labour was cheap and plenty, also intelligent - with entrenched "automation" like this, no inventions are actually needed. Which goes to show, that technology stratifyng society strangles itself, by producing a servant class outcompeting all technology. Give it a hundred years and the "natural" order of things seaps into relgion and culture such that to perform science is to dare the gods. PS: There are tons of good alternate history .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Years_of_Rice_and_Salt
• Waterluvian 4y ago
  I’m no expert on the history of invention but I assume there’s some latency where a technology is discovered and it takes time to make it useful. And then that opens up new technologies to be discovered etc. Something I’m curious about are what technologies sat around a very very long time with no real blocker for discovery. That it was as simple as “nobody thought to do it that way…”
  • aikinai 4y ago
    Fixed-wing flight is one. I remember that being a point in the aviation exhibit at the London Science Museum. Nothing was stopping people from building hang-gliders in at least the Renaissance, maybe earlier? But everyone was fixated on flapping wings. I think one of the Assassin’s Creed games plays with the idea, having Leonardo build a hang-glider for the main character.
    • ioseph 4y ago
      Unpowered gliders tend to need aerofoils which is a pretty advanced concept that took us a while to get right
      • GuB-42 4y ago
        And took quite a few lives in the process. Early hanggliders were particularly deadly before we understood how to make and pilot them safely.
      • jccooper 4y ago
        One of the Wrights' enabling technologies was the powered fan that allowed them to make a wind tunnel to refine the airfoil from barely-functional to fairly-useful. They used a small gasoline engine, which enabled them to construct their wind tunnel on a small independent budget. I suppose you could have done that on an institutional level as early as 1750 with steam engines (or perhaps earlier with water power) but mines and mills and factories weren't particularly interested in the problem.
  • causi 4y ago
• helsinkiandrew 4y ago
  There's a big gap between 'inventing' a steam engine as a diagram in a book or table top novelty and physically creating one that can do more work than a horse or two, can work continuously, and is safe to use. The technical advances of Newcomen and Watt also coincided with the ability to create boilers and pressure chambers that didn't explode (too often).
  • larrydag 4y ago
    Advances in manufacturing processes is often overlooked in the industrial age.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Two or three parts. First understanding at least some level what is happening or some useful effect. Second having materials and resources(like fuel) to build it to exploit the effect. Third actually having a use for whole thing. World and what was possible was just different back then. It is rather eye opening to remember how recent some things are. Like precision manufacturing such as metal lathe. Not that small parts were not done before, but it was all by hand...
  • ghaff 4y ago
    When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices. The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.
    • visiblink 4y ago
      The use of the word dependencies in this context is perfect. Untangling the history of technological innovation is an adventure into dependency hell.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  I've often thought we could have had integrated circuits shortly after the invention of photography. 150 years earlier! It would make an interesting steampunk world with steam and hydraulics and CPUs.
  • nousermane 4y ago
    Only as in "ability to replicate that alien technology". In the same way, all materials and construction techniques for 1896 Marconi radio receiver were available in Ancient Greece.
  • varjag 4y ago
    The theoretical stack required for successful IC design very much guarantees it wouldn't remain at steampunk.
    • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      Remember, 'integrated' meant initially just 'more than one component'. It would start with poster-sized wiring diagrams, switch elements, photosensitive spots etc. As it got smaller and more circuit elements were added the math may have progressed with it.
      • varjag 4y ago
        It's more than the math. It requires modern understanding of electromagnetism and material science accounting for semiconductors. From that things like practical electric motors/generators and plethora other technologies become essentially a corollary.
  • caymanjim 4y ago
    Why did you think that? We didn't have transistors until the 1960s.
    • JoeAltmaier 4y ago
      Well, integrated circuits started as just 'more than one component' on the same device. So a sensor and a switch perhaps. Or a resistor network. Etc. Start there and you rapidly improve (just like it happened later)
• cletus 4y ago
  I looked in Part 1 and 2 and didn't see this point raised, which is a shame because it's one of my favorite stories of intertwined technological process. An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons. Why I like this story is that it embodies the unintended consequences that underlies so much of progress, like Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone while trying to create something for the deaf. You see this with research now that's plagued with being goal-oriented. "What will you discover/prove/invent in the next 5-10 years?" Who can say? Also, the steam engine and the internal combustion engine are directly the products of technology created for war to kill people.
  • cfmcdonald 4y ago
    Actually a Savery engine (the type of engine the OP's post starts off with) doesn't have a piston at all. And the Newcomen atmospheric engine didn't require a very precise fit to function either. It wasn't until Watt started the drive for more efficient engines that accurately boring the cylinder became important.
    • antonhowes 4y ago
      Exactly! Part III or IV will end up talking about boring techniques of the 1650s (long before the famous John Wilkinson methods), but that is precisely the thing with Savery engines - and indeed with Newcomen engines, which worked with pistons long before Wilkinson too!
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    > An engine requires piston that move within a bore. To create the pressure that process has to be precise. This process was perfected in making cannons. There is speculation that the techniques for casting these cannons, was actually perfected in making church bells. Basically, if you turn a church bell on its side you have a primitive cannon. This may be one of the reasons that Europe was able to harness gunpowder more effectively and climb to dominance.
• dr_dshiv 4y ago
  It’s not discussed in the article, but the magic of steam in the 16th century was expressly investigated by Robert Fludd. As a mystical philosopher, he was attacked by the more scientific types of his time. This probably set back the steam engine. But clearly, he was really on to something!! Don’t discount the weird, I guess, is the takeaway.
  • antonhowes 4y ago
    Well-noticed! I used one of Fludd’s illustrations, but I ran out of space writing about Drebbel, which took us up to c.1607. Fludd will feature VERY heavily in Part III. Fludd eventually became totally obsessed with the inverted flask experiment - and recent historiography suggests he wasn’t seen as a crank, but actually highly respected at the time.
    • dr_dshiv 4y ago
      Nice! Thanks to the Ritman library in Amsterdam, I have access to a lot of Fludd’s published books (with fun marginalia etc…) but a fair amount of his work doesn’t seem to have been translated. (Maybe you’ve found otherwise?) Descartes and Mersenne present a early conflicted aversion to the occult/esoteric/natural magic (eg, topics like resonance). I presume that certain ideas became somewhat taboo. This is one reason why it may have taken so long for the concept of resonance to be adopted widely in the sciences (see Buchanan 2019 in Nature “Going into resonance”)
      • antonhowes 4y ago
        Ah nice. Yes, I’m not aware of full translations, though I often have to translate things myself (with a bit of help). In this particular case for Fludd I mainly used secondary literature on his use of the inverted flask experiment and (spoilers) weatherglasses, which also sometimes translate some significant sections. Very interesting on resonance - I’ll check that out. I seem to recall there was a PhD thesis I skim-read that was all about the relationship between music and weatherglasses in Fludd’s thought.
• deleted 4y ago
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• stareatgoats 4y ago
  Not sure what conclusion the author will come to as an answer to the question in the title (part III is still to come). But if it doesn't include the liberation of inventors (i.e. the protection of intellectual property through patents) and the legal framework for "anyone" to profit from their inventions then I'll be disappointed. As his story indicates so far it was not for the want of ingenuity that the industrial revolution did not occur before, but the social framework for transforming the society in the way that the industrial revolution did was simply not at hand. Primarily because the decisionmakers that held the power were tied to another mode of production, usually involving fleecing peasants. That the industrial revolution needed the steam engine goes without saying. But the steam engine without the industrial revolution was a mere party trick.
  • Thorentis 4y ago
    I reject the idea that patent and IP law would have made these developments occur sooner. In fact, I blame the slow down in technological development partly on patent and IP law. You think the rapid development seen during the industrial revolution could have happened if people were at litigious as they are now? The ability to create derivative inventions is essential to progress.
    • stareatgoats 4y ago
      Your perspective on patents seems colored by the relative recent advent of patent trolls and the use of litigation to stifle innovation and competition. I suggest you look at the situation in England around 300 years ago and compare to the feudal system that was the rule elsewhere at the time - everything had to be approved by the king or the nobility, who had vested interests in land owning and serf systems. This social order was the real inhibitor of technological progress that England was the first country the liberate itself from. Laws that protected the IP rights of inventors were absolutely crucial to that process.
      • lolc 4y ago
        Check out the Wright brothers patent war at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
• mhb 4y ago
  Primitive Technology: Iron knife made from bacteria https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o https://youtu.be/dhW4XFGQB4o
• cfmcdonald 4y ago
  For another take on this story, please check out my blog series on the Age of Steam: https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/ https://technicshistory.com/the-age-of-steam/
• bambax 4y ago
  > Hero [Hero of Alexandria, 10-70 AD] even suggested a mechanical use for the effect. By setting a fire on a hollow, airtight altar, the heated air within would flow down a tube into a sphere full of water, which in turn would be pushed up another tube into a hanging bucket. The bucket, when sufficiently heavy with water, would then pull on a rope to open some temple doors. Crucially, when the fire was extinguished, Hero noted that the cooling of the air in the altar would draw the water back into the sphere again, lighten the bucket, and so allow the doors to be closed by a counterweight. Put the contraption on a chariot, use the ropes to turn the wheels instead of "temple doors" (!) and voilà: you have an auto-mobile. Even if it's much less practical than using a horse, it's amazing that in almost 2000 years, nobody thought of making that for its sheer entertainment value -- or even to convince people that ghosts exist!
  • masswerk 4y ago
    But why would you want to use such a flimsy technology, if you have horses? There is no way an engine like this could outrun a lean and speedy chariot with two to four horses. Also, even a primitive mechanism like this may have encountered fatal problems with dirt, dust and sand. (Mind that steam locomotion was first tried for roads, which was a total failure because of the quality of roads, even in major city centers like London.)
    • bambax 4y ago
      That was answered in my comment? At first it would be much less useful than a horse, yes, but it would be so entertaining! And magical! Sell it to kings, make bets... Or accuse people of sorcery, have them burned...
      • masswerk 4y ago
        Well, this is an application: sell it to the king, accuse him of sorcery, have him burned. Become king (and ride horses.) ;-)
    • kragen 4y ago
      There are lots of applications for heat engines that don't involve mobility: grinding wheat to flour, threshing and winnowing wheat, fulling cloth, sewing cloth together, hammering hot iron or annealed cold bronze, blowing the bellows on a forge or bloomery, sawing wood, turning wood or stone on a lathe, weaving cloth, spinning thread, playing music, crushing ore, grinding a new edge on a knife or axe with a grindstone, turning a potter's wheel, writing, kneading bread, calculating, and, as mentioned, raising water (from a well, from a river, into your fields, into a tower, into a salt pond, or out of a mine or swamp). All of these are things that people were already doing before Heron, in many cases devoting their lives to them, but steam power was not applied to some of them until less than a century ago. In medieval times we can add turning metal on a lathe and winding crossbows. Think of the most common German surnames, which are all occupational: Müller (grinding wheat), Schmidt (hammering iron), Schneider (sewing cloth), Fischer (catching fish), Weber (weaving cloth), Meyer (owning land), Wagner (making wagon wheels), Becker (baking bread), Schulz (herding peasants), Hoffmann (organizing the court), Schäfer (herding sheep), Koch (cooking food), Bauer (farming), and Richter (judging). This is a somewhat skewed sampling of occupations of men in Germany at the late-medieval or early-modern time surnames were imposed. If you were a Schmidt or a Weber you could expect to spend decades doing hard, physical labor every day, in a fixed physical location, labor that is now mostly done by steam.
• xaedes 4y ago
  I was always under the impression that it would be cool to have solar cells or mirrors automatically follow the sun using mechanical processes like those depicted in the article, without the need for additional electronics and motors. Does something like this exist and I only don't know of it?
  • carapace 4y ago
    Wax. > A wax motor is a linear actuator device that converts thermal energy into mechanical energy by exploiting the phase-change behaviour of waxes.[1] During melting, wax typically expands in volume by 5–20% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wax_motor
• mjh2539 4y ago
  Access to machining and steel production at scale. Steam power was known in antiquity.
• gwbas1c 4y ago
  Maybe put the engineering discussion aside for a moment and think about the developments in economics and capitalism at the same time? A cheaper way to do work? Invest in developing it!
• kleton 4y ago
  A practical steam engine requires a high level of ferrous metallurgy. Samuel Clemens lost his brother to a boiler explosion on a steamer. It was a common occurrence in those days.
• bichiliad 4y ago
  I'm reading a really good book on the history of steam power called "Fossil Capital"[0]. The thesis so far seems to be that access to — and need for — more portable energy like fossil fuels drove the ability to expand. This in turn induced more demand for energy as humans developed further and further away from places that traditionally provided energy in fixed places, like rivers that could power water wheels. The book ties this into the roots of the idea of infinite growth, as well as the climate crisis. It's a little sad in that respect, but also genuinely fascinating if you like history. [0]:https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital https://www.versobooks.com/books/2002-fossil-capital
• legitster 4y ago
  Environmental collapse and the price of steel! I think people forget just how expensive metal was. Carpenters would lock up their saws because the blades were so precious. People knew how to make cheaper steel from coal for a long time, but it was regarded as an inferior product and avoided. However, charcoal is labor intensive stuff to collect. By the 1700s, some cities in Europe had so depleted their available forests that they were forced to turn to inferior coal fired steel. But after a few decades of being forced to produce crappy steel, they figured out ways to make it better. In the end, you had steel that was drastically cheaper than before. Cheap enough to build boilers. I think people make the mistake of thinking the steam engine kicked off the industrial revolution. But I believe the spark was cheap metal. And they never would have had to switch to cheap metal if they hadn't completely depleted their environment.
  • mason55 4y ago
    Sounds like energy production recently. While oil was cheap enough we had no reason to invest in cleaner tech. Even the threat of climate change isn’t enough. It’s only when oil gets real expensive that we invest in alternatives.
    • 3pt14159 4y ago
      Imagine all of those minds that went into oil extraction and where else they could have been better spent over the years. I know turbines really leveraged computer models to achieve such stunning efficiency, but in all honesty I don't think it would have taken much past the 70s for us to have achieved nuclear / renewables at similar energy output as oil / gas at the same timeframe if we didn't have the shortcut available for so long.
      • Gravityloss 4y ago
        Oil extraction engineering has a pretty phenomenal return on investment. If oil sells at 100 dollars per barrel, that's 600 dollars per cubic meter. If you produce a cubic meter per second (1/200th of world production), that's 50 million dollars per day. But certainly, nuclear or renewables could have been developed more and earlier.
• mitghi 4y ago
  Do you mean Source Engine?
• zcw100 4y ago
  This question reminded me of a show that I used to love watching, Connections with James Burke. I'm sure there are aspects that it is missing but it's a very well told story of what needed to come together for the invention of the steam engine. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68mfbf https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x68mfbf
• lambda_matt 4y ago
  There is an absolutely fantastic book by Simon Winchester called The Perfectionists. He has a chapter on the steam engine-- the long and the short of it was it couldn't exist until they could precisely machine the bore and piston to adequate tolerances produce enough power without accidentally producing a bomb
  • antonhowes 4y ago
    Maybe for the Watt engine, but this does not apply to the Savery or Newcomen engines. (Though Part III, or perhaps IV, will have a few notes on some almost totally forgotten machine makers of the 1650s.
• aniijbod 4y ago
  Silly me, I saw that title and I genuinely thought this: "it's gonna be some ingeniously titled PR puff cunningly contrived to get me to read about what was behind Valve's decision to rename their 'Source' game engine to 'Steam Engine'.
• mariuolo 4y ago
  The unavailability of rubber as sealant both in Europe and Asia is not mentioned in either part I or II.
  • antonhowes 4y ago
    Neither the Savery nor Newcomen engines used rubber, so that doesn’t work as a limiting factor. That’s why I didn’t mention it.
• zackmorris 4y ago
  Subjugation. Almost the entirety of the human population has been under some form of servitude or bondage since the beginning. Only a handful of experiments in democracy like the USA managed to exist for more than a few hundred years. And those owed their existence to either slavery or the oppression of women. For every James Watt, there are 10,000 people just as smart who spent the entirety of their lives toiling to make someone else rich. As long as we view progress through the lens of our own merit, nothing will ever change. Which is perhaps my greatest disappointment with how the 21st century has played out vs the original vision of the internet as a great equalizer providing knowledge and resources for everyone in an egalitarian fashion. We all got sold a bill of goods by the wealthy financiers who own everything now, including HN which was quickly coopted sadly.
• beefman 4y ago
  Part I was posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31765136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31765136
  • arbitrage 4y ago
    Thanks, beefman
• kragen 4y ago
  To me the most surprising thing about this series is that de Caus had a working CSP (concentrated solar power) setup by 01615 (https://antonhowes.substack.com/i/57230676/solar-powered-steam-engines https://antonhowes.substack.com/i/57230676/solar-powered-ste..., original source https://archive.org/details/raisonsdesforce00Caus https://archive.org/details/raisonsdesforce00Caus). I had thought CSP only dated to Shuman's installation in Egypt in 01913, but I see that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power#Histo... also mentions that Mouchout did a solar steam engine in 01866. But 01615! We've had working solar power machinery for four centuries.
  • huseyinkeles 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, what’s with the dates prefixed by 0?
    • zamadatix 4y ago
      https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-and-10k-compliance-at-home/ https://longnow.org/ideas/02013/12/31/long-now-years-five-di... I'm always a bit split when I see it. Even when used genuinely it still comes off as making the comment feel like it exists to showcase long now instead of the response. On the bright side out of all the things to get over this ranks on the "easy" side of the list.
  • selimthegrim 4y ago
    Not to be outdone, we had solar thermo photovoltaics in the early 1900s https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low-tech-solar-panel.html https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2021/10/how-to-build-a-low...
    • kragen 4y ago
      It's an interesting speculation, but it might not be correct. In particular, the subhead about how it might have been highly efficient is crucial to its potential usefulness, but the highest efficiency number claimed is 5%, less than a quarter of current mainstream PV, and an eighth the efficiency of current lab PV. And the "thermo" part seems like it was a red herring. How efficient is such a device? If Cove's device was 20% efficient it was an unheralded breakthrough, though a toxic one, unlike modern silicon solar panels (contrary to a false statement in the article), and made with relatively expensive materials (antimony isn't just poisonous, it also costs US$11/kg). If it was 2% efficient, it might have been viable in a few niche uses. If it was 0.2% or 0.02% efficient, it was a laboratory curiosity. The article says Cove's prototypes were 2.75% efficient and 5% efficient, producing 45 watts from 1.5m² and 60 watts from 1.125m² respectively, which I calculate as 3% and 5.3% efficient, respectively. But it also says the guy went to jail for a year for defrauding his investors. But apparently nobody has been able to reproduce Cove's results in the last century. If you do want to, as the article says, "build low-tech photovoltaic devices, which convert sunlight into electricity", you can get about 1% efficiency out of red copper oxide, another toxic semiconductor like the zinc antimonide intermetallic erroneously described as an alloy in the article; this is a common science fair project for kids, and Wilhelm Hallwachs demonstrated solar panels using this chemistry in 01904, the same year as Cove's first experiments. Toshiba managed to get thin-film red copper oxide PV panels past 8% efficiency last year.
• dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Arguably, the steam engine is a form of artificial intelligence. At least with Watt’s engine, the “governor” plays an essential information processing role in modulating the pressure. Sensing and reacting to keep a measured value in an optimal range is pretty much the definition of AI (see Norvig’s definition of intelligence). Autopilot is another example of non-computational AI (autopilot was invented in 1914).
  • kortilla 4y ago
    No, a control cycle is not AI. Otherwise a dam with an overflow relief is AI too and it has been around much longer than a couple of hundred years.
    • dr_dshiv 4y ago
      Then, I would propose that we refer to computational AI and noncomputational AI. Because a control cycle is absolutely what AI is—and yes, it is much older than we think. See Chapter 1 of “Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach”
      • kortilla 4y ago
        No it’s not, otherwise we wouldn’t have a new term for what a thermostat has been doing forever. Just look at the Wikipedia definition for a basic start on artificial intelligence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
        • dr_dshiv 4y ago
          Um, no. First: thermostats haven’t been around forever (they were popularized by Mark Honeywell in 1906, of Honeywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Honeywell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_C._Honeywell). Second: autopilot wasn’t invented until 1914 (before computers). Third: the Wikipedia article you refer to totally aligns with what I’m claiming: “An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chances of success. Any system that has goal-directed behavior can be analyzed as an intelligent agent: something as simple as a thermostat, as complex as a human being, as well as large systems such as firms, biomes or nations. The intelligent agent paradigm became widely accepted during the 1990s, and currently serves as the definition of the field.”
• simonblack 4y ago
  Machinery depends on metal-working to a fine-enough precision. Steam can escape through very fine gaps and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the engine. Apart from that being a dangerous place to be in for humans. Even 60 years ago, your new car needed to be 'run-in' for a couple of thousand miles because tolerances in the cylinders weren't able to be made fine enough yet. When was the the last time you had to 'run-in' a new car?